Study: Wage gap picture mixed for TN’s working women

The wage gap for Tennessee’s working women is narrower than the nation as a whole, but wider for the state’s Hispanic women, a new study says.

A woman who worked full-time in Tennessee was paid 80.3 cents for every $1 earned by a man in 2011, the National Women’s Law Center said. That was better than the national average of 77 cents.

But the picture was mixed for minority women in the Volunteer State, the study’s authors said.

The typical African-American woman in Tennessee made 69.8 cents for every $1 that a white, non-Hispanic man earned. That was the seventh-highest rate in the nation, which averaged 64 cents.

The state’s Hispanic women, though, fared worse: They earned 52 cents, below the U.S. average of 55.5 cents. That gave Tennessee the 20th lowest rate among states, the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group said.

It released the study to mark Equal Pay Day, the point when a typical woman’s previous year and current year’s wages catch up to the average man’s earnings from last year. That day is today, the group said.